activistPnk

The preview text is a mess -- I suggest visiting the link.

Great story!

The preview text is a mess -- I suggest visiting the link.

The elephant in the room is the injustice of banks mandating disclosure of phone numbers (thus excluding people without phones and people who have a healthy objection to sharing their phone number with businesses). Then the fact that phone numbers are used as human identifiers. That bank is likely vulnerable to theft with their reliance on phone numbers as a unique identifier.

The status quo of tracking how good a machine is by how many years it lasts is sloppy and inaccurate. If that were the only measure of car reliability, we would be working ½ blind in trying to work out how long cars are lasting and predicting failure unreliably. The ultimate non-ecocidal trend needs to be to build things to last. Progress is hindered by our shitty metrics. Consumers pay a lot more for Miele machines on ½ blind faith that they will save them money. But they cannot be certain that paying double will yield them double the service. If consumers could more accurately measure the service they get out of a machine, there would be more pressure on the producers to compete on price-per-load. As a consequence, there would be more incentive to offer parts even beyond whatever right to repair law imposes because when repair extends life in a measurable way it wins the price-per-load over a lifetime competition.

Washing machines have internal scales so they can refuse to run when overloaded. So in addition to load count they could even be tracking how much fabric in weight they have cleaned.

So new rule: washing machines and dishwashers must collect metrics and must disclose them to consumers in a way that does not depend on a cloud connection or smartphone.

An original poster asks a question or attempts to create a thread to compile information about a topic, and there is always some clown or asshole who cannot resist posting a snide remark. If the snide remark is clever or captures the sentiment of many, it gets a flood of up votes and rises to the top, bringing with it a tree of replies to the snide remark. Useful constructive answers get buried because they are boring to the wider audience who just likes to see a good roasting. I think there are more kids in the threadiverse than we expect.

So content that’s nearly garbage dominates the thread and drowns out the thread’s purpose, disservicing the OP and all those who want the same answer or collaboration. It’s a design failure of Lemmy to be blind to this very basic characteristic of human nature.

Censorship is unreasonable in this situation. But so is the status quo. Nothing wrong with a bunch of clowns having fun, but that fun should happen non-disruptively on the sidelines and out of the way. The OP has a mission and purpose. The OP should be able to click a red fish that flags a post as a red herring. From there, that tree should be pushed out of the way somehow.. to a sidebar or folded, or a subthread of sorts.. call it the clown room. Critics who just want to bitch or push contempt should still have a voice. Make it so they have to click a “criticism” button to then step into a space with unwanted criticism.

There is wanted criticism and unwanted criticism. An OP might say “Roast me..” or “what’s wrong with this approach?” If the OP intends for the discussion to be controversial, then the OP obviously has no interest in the flagging anything. But if the OP has a mission to accomplish, they should have a control.

Another way to look at this is the fedi could use a stackexchange replacement. Stackexchange never has garbage getting high ranks. I’ve never had an acct there so I don’t know how they manage it, but it seems Lemmy could learn from that.

The idea that boycotting is not participating in society could not be more perversely incorrect. Boycotting prioritizes society above yourself. Neglecting to boycott is the selfish act of putting your own personal benefit above all else and abandoning one of the few tools we have to improve things while feeding harms of society. Both kinds of consumption are “participation” but if you choose to feed the baddies then your participation is detrimental.

It’s really perverse to refer to boycotters as non-participants when they are actively taking on the burden of informing themselves of who the bad players are, tracking supply chains to brands, and sacrificing selfish benefits in order to participate in the least destructive way for the purpose of improving society.

Convenience zombies who just grab whatever they want may choose poorly, or not. But it’s worse than a coin toss whether the outcome is detrimental because the most harmful suppliers have the advantage of not being burdened by ethics. Scrapping ethics enables them to offer the most value for the money and undercut the more ethical choices. So if you simply neglect ethics in your consumer decision, you are only looking at value for the money and statistically expected to choose a more socially detrimental option.

It harms everyone because the lesser of evils gets driven out and the worst suppliers prevail. The US saw this with printers when Oki pulled out of the US marketplace. Now the least detrimental option tends to be Brother, which still exposes people to shenanigans. We lost the most ethical option while HP dominates.

This seems like quite a shitty design. I would never buy an HP but I grabbed one off a curb that someone dumped just for the ADF scanner.

It gave a missing print head error. Youtube/invidious videos yEOqnrzwHF4, XvN_i50KShA, g6ySDBW1HRs, 7H2bA8b8XHc and xbM_Eat0VmI show attempts to fix this garbage. Ink leaks can reach the spring and block the connection. The springs contact an unreachable area where disassembly is not possible because they used glue. The UI is vague; does not say which color or contact is broken. I repeated the fix procedure 5 or so times and even sanded the spring ends and it still does not work.

Lucky the scanner still works. But worth noting some HP printer models refuse to allow the scanner to function if there is an issue with the ink, which is an asshole design IMO.

Note that if I were to get it working, I would not buy HP ink. I would perhaps experiment with making homemade ink from spent coffee and tea leaves.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14979823

This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.

The importance of Solarpunks reading the ToC essay became starkly clear when someone said they ticked a box in a voting booth and essentially said: I’m done… I give up. They got ~75+ pats on the back for this hard work whilst condemning taking further action (activism).

Voting in an election is the bare minimum duty expected of everyone. It’s not even activism. In some countries that much effort is obligatory (Belgium). Tim Wu covers voting in his essay, speculating that younger generations stand in lines less than older generations had to, suggesting that this inconvenience might be attributed to lower voter turnout among the young (2018, so pre-mail-in ballots).

From the solarpunk manifesto:

4. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Convenience is the beaten path of the mainstream. Convenience zombies don’t even have to be cattle-herded because our corporate adversaries have designed the infrastructure to ensure the path of least resistence automatically leads the masses to feed them revenue. Solarpunks resist. We do not accept the path of least resistence. We bring resistence because we understand that convenience is the enemy of activism more often than not.

But not everyone is on the same page. More Solarpunks need to become familiar with Tim Wu’s essay for their own benefit and also for solidarity and empowerment of the movement. We need to get better at recognising tyranny of convenience when we see it.

The perceived inconvenience of boycotting puts many people off especially if they have not absorbed the concepts of the ToC essay. The slightest change to their lifestyle is likened to living in a cave and triggers people to think about a meme where a guy pops out of a well. Boycotting gets progressively easier. It can also start in baby steps so it’s less of a sacrifice. As someone who has been boycotting thousands of companies and brands for over ten years and consciously choosing the hard path for longer than the age of Wu’s essay, it feels less like a prison to me and looks more like those trapped in the cult of convenience are the ones in a prison of sorts. A useful task by the solarpunk movement would be to try to influence convenience zombies toward activism.

One quote from the essay:

Convenience is all destination and no journey.

It’s even worse than that in some cases. The destination can be wrong as a consequence of convenience. The convenience of neglecting the duty of an ethical consumer to boycott leads to a bad place -- financing and enabling adversaries of our values.

The NY Times article is inconveniently enshitified in a paywall. Since this essay is something folks would want to keep a local copy of anyway, I have linked a PDF instead of the original link. The text is also below for those who prefer to exand a spoiler over a PDF.

Tyranny of Convenience, by Tim Wu

“The Tyranny of Convenience” by Tim Wu

Feb. 16, 2018 The New York Times (opinion)

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.

As Evan Williams, a co‑founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech‑related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance. Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much. Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor‑saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes‑washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late‑19th‑century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self‑cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid‑20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button.

Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self‑destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time‑consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co‑opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self‑expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self‑expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one‑click, one‑stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.

We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.

As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open‑source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor‑saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.

An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.

We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia, the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads” and a contributing opinion writer.

This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.

The importance of Solarpunks reading the ToC essay became starkly clear when someone said they ticked a box in a voting booth and essentially said: I’m done… I give up. They got ~75+ pats on the back for this hard work whilst condemning taking further action (activism).

Voting in an election is the bare minimum duty expected of everyone. It’s not even activism. In some countries that much effort is obligatory (Belgium). Tim Wu covers voting in his essay, speculating that younger generations stand in lines less than older generations had to, suggesting that this inconvenience might be attributed to lower voter turnout among the young (2018, so pre-mail-in ballots).

From the solarpunk manifesto:

4. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Convenience is the beaten path of the mainstream. Convenience zombies don’t even have to be cattle-herded because our corporate adversaries have designed the infrastructure to ensure the path of least resistence automatically leads the masses to feed them revenue. Solarpunks resist. We do not accept the path of least resistence. We bring resistence because we understand that convenience is the enemy of activism more often than not.

But not everyone is on the same page. More Solarpunks need to become familiar with Tim Wu’s essay for their own benefit and also for solidarity and empowerment of the movement. We need to get better at recognising tyranny of convenience when we see it.

The perceived inconvenience of boycotting puts many people off especially if they have not absorbed the concepts of the ToC essay. The slightest change to their lifestyle is likened to living in a cave and triggers people to think about a meme where a guy pops out of a well. Boycotting gets progressively easier. It can also start in baby steps so it’s less of a sacrifice. As someone who has been boycotting thousands of companies and brands for over ten years and consciously choosing the hard path for longer than the age of Wu’s essay, it feels less like a prison to me and looks more like those trapped in the cult of convenience are the ones in a prison of sorts. A useful task by the solarpunk movement would be to try to influence convenience zombies toward activism.

One quote from the essay:

Convenience is all destination and no journey.

It’s even worse than that in some cases. The destination can be wrong as a consequence of convenience. The convenience of neglecting the duty of an ethical consumer to boycott leads to a bad place -- financing and enabling adversaries of our values.

The NY Times article is inconveniently enshitified in a paywall. Since this essay is something folks would want to keep a local copy of anyway, I have linked a PDF instead of the original link. The text is also below for those who prefer to exand a spoiler over a PDF.

You should be every day voting with your wallet to prevent money flowing into the wrong hands. Boycott these ALEC members who non-stop fund the republican war chests:

• FedEx
• UPS
• Motorola
• Anheuser Busch
• American Express
• Bose
• Chevron
• Marlboro
• Sony
• Texaco
• Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)

Quit driving. It’s not just the fuel burn that harms the environment. When you buy fuel, you fund the oil companies who fund republicans. Trump’s 4th biggest cash source came from oil giants. There is nothing worse for the environment than republicans.

Find out which companies funded Trump’s war chest directly, and boycott them.

There is likely a long list of banks. Banks love republicans in general. We need to get that list and get people off those banks. People should be using cash anyway since banks finance fossil fuels, private prisons, and republicans. In the very least, if you give a shit and you are not a deadbeat then you will avoid using these banks.

(edit) Home Depot, Disney, …, probably others. That’s a long article not an easy list so work required.

grab your wallet is an election cycle out of date, and sadly it’s in Google docs (so use Tor). But it still has a bit of relevance.

Europeans— You can take these actions too. You couldn’t vote for Kamala but you always have the power to vote with your feet. The first ALEC list is international entities.

US folks— In addition to the ALEC list at the top, the following are also ALEC members which (I believe) are US-only:

• CenturyLink
• Charter Communications
• Farmers/Foremost
• Geico
• LMG (Liberty Mutual/Safeco)
• Nationwide Insurance
• PNC bank
• StateFarm
• TimeWarner

(update) Dug up a list of companies that are said to finance AIPAC, a PAC who targets democrats who go against Israel. It blows a huge amount of money on the right-wing candidate which apparently works every time. It’s so effective there is a verb for it: AIPAC-ed. I have not vetted the list but when I look at it it’s all usual suspects of corps I already boycott.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14841773

Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.

Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list.

So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.

Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.

Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. There is also a filter tool to easily specify your criteria of what must function to obtain a custom shortlist:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Special:Drilldown/Devices?DeviceType=handset

Then phones on the shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list, which seems to be exclusively Sony¹.

So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.

(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices

(update 2) Calyx OS has an interesting list some of which overlaps with pmOS

So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market. Worth noting that these phones are supported by both pmOS and Calyx OS:

• Fairphone 4
• Google Pixel 3a
• SHIFT SHIFT6mq

¹ Caution about Sony: they are an ALEC member who supports hard-right politics. They were also caught using GNU software in their DRM shit which violated FOSS licensing in a component designed to oppress. Obviously buying a new Sony thing is unethical. But perhaps a 2nd-hand one is fine. It’s still dicey though because the 2nd-hand market still feeds the 1st-hand market and rewards the original consumer. Sometimes it’s clear you’re not buying from an original owner, like someone on the street with a box of 100+ phones.

(update) It would help if we could filter out all the phones with non-removable batteries. I can confirm that these have non-removeable batteries:

• BQ Aquarius X5

First of all, detergent pods are for dummies who cannot measure the right amount of detergent for a job and those who don’t know that water hardness is a factor. They are for convenience zombies who cannot be bothered to think. So from the very start, pods are not for solarpunks.

Someone told me they had a problem with their dishwasher because undisolved gelatin sacs were gumming up their drain. The linked article goes into clogs. This article (if you can get past the enshitification) says there is research on an environmental impact by pod sacks. So that’s also antithetical to solarpunkness.

So do it right. Fuck pods. They cost more anyway. Buy powdered detergent if you have soft water (or if your dishwasher has a built-in water softener) and use less (to avoid etching). If you have hard water, either use liquid detergent or just use a bigger dose of powder.